Fall 2021
Issue 25
Your Impossible Voice #25 opens with a story of love, loneliness, and DJs in Argentina, and closes with wayward Taco Bell bandits loose in the Buckeye state. In between, it delivers new short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction exploring anaphylactic reactions to dust, languages that sound like bonfire flames, dollar-store groceries, golden molars and nectars, witchy weather apps, migraines, matricide, and so much more.
Contributors include Cecilia Pavón and Jacob Steinberg, Robert Lopez, Shin Yu Pai, Brian Henry, Daryll Delgado, Linda Morales Caballero and Marko Miletich, PhD, Caroline Fernelius, Emilee Prado, Robert(a) Ruisza Marshall, Khalil AbuSharekh, Mercury-Marvin Sunderland, Gillian Parrish, Steve Bargdill, Diti Ronen and Joanna Chen, Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Kevin McIlvoy, Adhimas Prasetyo and Liswindio Apendicaesar, and Tamiko Dooley. Cover art by Despy Boutris.
Sister in Basement, Manny Again Elsewhere
Robert Lopez
“What’s happened between them is so complex it would be impossible for anyone to articulate it without the benefit of hindsight or omniscience.”
Epigenetics
Diti Ronen
Translated by Joanna Chen
“A cold wind is also a voice / and distant music / a man turning over in his sleep / dreaming of home.”
i once was a witch
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi
“They carry a little flame inside they do / To say their name takes a little fire
Visitations
Caroline Fernelius
“On occasion, home-boundedness was almost frightening; she felt like an amphibian in a very tiny jar.”
Auditions for Interference Theory
Emilee Prado
“If you input more information while the memory is fragile, you can imbed the old memory with something new.”
Catastrophic
Brian Henry
“When I think of how / my life was spent.”
Life Stories
Robert(a) Ruisza Marshall
“It will, I tell myself, do no one harm if I post something about R, if I insinuate a greater relationship than was really there. No one will call me out or call me false. Do we really think the dead aren’t watching?”
marble chunk
Shin Yu Pai
“it rested in a parking lot in North Seattle / the unhewn hunk of quarried stone touched”
shelf life
Shin Yu Pai
“when my son’s cough / lingers, I feed him spoonfuls”
The Embassy
Khalil AbuSharekh
“I connected with her because, like her, I sit in our family grocery store every day. I found them to be like us: family, traditions, war, and now they are a strong country. Japanese people are exactly like us, but advanced.”
Shaky From Malnutrition
Mercury-Marvin Sunderland
“MOM. YOU CAN’T FOLLOW ME AROUND.”
Weatherman
Gillian Parrish
“When he wakes, he wakes in sweat, wakes in panic, turns to see if she’s in pain, if she wants water or his warm hand on her back, but she’s not there, and his heart falls into his stomach and he remembers.”
Before the Jazz Ends
Adhimas Prasetyo
Translated by Liswindio Apendicaesar
“before the jazz ends, you imagine a piece of night slowing down.”
After Jazz Ends
Adhimas Prasetyo
Translated by Liswindio Apendicaesar
“you feel like a part of you is left inside jazz. you find another part that is reading this poem.”
Scent of Wood
Adhimas Prasetyo
Translated by Liswindio Apendicaesar
“so much of drizzle at that dark night, / when the cold and my fingers were fighting to crawl
at your nape hair.”
The Taco Robbers From Last Week
Steve Bargdill
“How awesome would it be to hit the Taco Bells in Columbus? Kick back on the couch with a couple tacos and drink Mountain Dew. We could have coasters to keep condensation off our coffee tables.”